From the perspective of economics, the cinema is the movies, commodities that are produced, circulated, and watched within the context of
consumer culture. To focus on the German movie industry as an economic
institution demands, then, not in the first instance a discussion of those canonical German films that have enriched the world cinema or of innovative
shooting styles that emerged in Germany; rather, we are concerned with the
products of a national industry within the context of international competition and exchange. Market factors such as technological invention and patents, export-import relations, coproduction contracts, censorship, and quotas
establish the context in which questions about national reputation and national
interests can be formulated. In Germany the emergence of the movie industry assumed a special significance because it was perceived there as the paradigm of modem experience, playing an essential role in the mediation of culture during the society's growth as a major political and economic force. Both
domestic production (a diverse spectrum ranging from cheap potboilers to art
films) and foreign imports (prior to World War I from Scandinavia and France,
in the 1920s from the United States and the Soviet Union) became, for example, the catalysts for wide-ranging discussions about the cinema's power
to subvert traditional oppositions between high and low culture, art and commerce, urbanity and domesticity.

The Early German Movie Industry

As in other countries, the birth of the German cinema emerged from
sophisticated technological know-how in the field of photography and was
mainly associated with pioneering entrepreneurs, engineers, and technicians
such as Ottomar Anschütz, the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky, Oskar
Messter, Guido Seeber, and Karl Geyer. In other words the rapid growth of

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